In 2012 and 2013, I wrote a couple of blogs about the shrubs – and the flowers – that were doing well on our south-facing, sun-baked, shade-free, heavy blue clay acre of Abruzzo. The good news is that all the recommended shrubs are still alive, well, and...

When we moved into our Abruzzo property in early 2009, one of the things I wanted to do with the waiting acre of mud was to lay out a decent sized vegetable patch – and an orchard. I’d always grown veg, but in the small patch of the garden we left behind in...

A while back, I wrote a blog called Five Foolproof Shrubs for an Italian Garden, so the logical sequel to this has to be a blog featuring five equally foolproof flowers for an Italian garden. Here then is a mix of ultra-reliable perennials (plants that with a modicum...

Can our Abruzzo garden survive the nightly ravages of a wild boar ? Or can an unlikely improvised solution persuade piggy to pork off ? So far this year at Villasfor2, we’ve had one visitor we really could have done without. A wild boar who decided that our...

It was only when the builders were gone and tranquility had been restored to the olive groves and vineyards around our Abruzzo villas that we began to fully appreciate how rich the area was in wildlife. We’d experienced the twinkling magic of the fireflies that...